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(See my earlier posts for introduction to the series.)

In a large design project you certainly will have designers from all over the bell curve. Naturally, you probably try to optimize that you can be working with the best people all the time. But the same bell curve will still be there with the group of the best… So my question is this: how to assign different design tasks for different kinds of designers?

The obvious answer would be that you put the strongest in the most challenging and most relevant tasks, and the less experienced in the least significant parts of the design. However, if you do this, you will have one surprising effect. You probably need to spend more time with the inexperienced designers than the strong ones. They need more support, they have more questions, they need your design input and supervision more frequently, their designs will have more comments in reviews, etc. As a result, you will be spending most of your time in the design tasks that you just had decided to be less central to the success of the project.

I think that the key to solving such issues lies in careful teaming: the designers will be split in working teams or pairs where less experienced always work with more experienced colleagues. In this way, the responsibility of tutoring is distributed more evenly. The same challenges will still be there in the small teams, but they will still be more manageable that way.

PS. I have been considering for a long time if I should write about this delicate topic. I sincerely hope that nobody that I’ve ever worked with will take offense.